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[dramatic music]
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[elephants rumbling]
[splashing]
[elephant trumpeting]
[helicopter roaring]
[tense music]
[gun firing]
[elephants trumpeting]
Jambo [Hello]
[spear thudding] [elephants trumpeting]
[peaceful music]
[harp glissando]
- [Narrator] Our ancestors originally came
from the tropical rainforest.
So, the tropical rainforest in a sense,
is our Garden of Eden. And the gardeners
in the Garden of Eden are the megafauna: the orangutans,
the elephants, and occasionally the rhinoceros,
believe it or not.
The fate of tropical rainforest
is inextricably tied to the fate of these megafauna.
[elephant trumpeting]
So, do we need rainforests?
Of course we need rainforests.
We need oxygen, we need to breath.
It's a clichÃ© to say by saving orangutans
or by saving elephants, we are saving ourselves.
But it's actually true if we look at the longterm.
Humans are very bad at looking at the long term.
We want it now.
- Yes, it's always very difficult in our terribly busy,
frantic, and dangerous world to focus on non-human issues.
But nevertheless there is a massive crisis going on
with wildlife around the world.
And it's not just the charismatic species
that we're talking about.
[cub growling]
There are a ton of smaller species
that are also under massive threat and species
that we don't favor quite so much.
[hyena cackling]
Evolution, or evolutionary biologists, some might say,
and certainly creationists might say,
and certainly religions might say, that the human being
is the pinnacle of evolution.
[engine roaring]
[baboon screeching]
Well, if it is, we are one
of the stupidest species on the planet.
Because I cannot think of any other species
that goes around intentionally trashing its own home.
So, if we're the apex of evolution,
then if there is a God, He made a real mistake.
- Once you understand there's no sharp line dividing us
from the rest of the animal kingdom and that we are part
of the animal kingdom and not as we arrogantly suppose,
somehow separated, you then can ask yourself,
"Well, okay how is it that we're different?"
because we are different.
And I think it's the explosive development
of the human intellect.
And so how come the most intellectual species
to ever walk the planet is wiping out the other life forms,
is destroying ecosystems...
Because this, in the end,
is going to lead to our destruction.
So, we destroy these animals at our own peril
without thinking of the future of our own species.
[plane roaring]
The real cause of wildlife crime
is corruption, and corruption, it's greed.
The real conflict is powerful people,
many times government officials, who are the ones
in the heart of organized crime,
that's basically activating hundreds of poachers,
across many countries.
The illegal wildlife trade is not rooted in poverty at all.
In fact, poverty has nothing to do with this issue.
It is in fact, the rich and the powerful
that actually are the part of this problem.
- These are people that have made reputations
and made a very, very, very strong impact in the world
and they've made that impact in a very violent way.
They've killed people, they've executed entire families,
they've bribed officials, they've put people in places
where they can make decisions
that impact policies and governments.
You're not talking about you know, your run of the mill,
poor poacher who's running around with a 1947 rifle.
You're talking about extremely powerful,
extremely influential people in positions of power
that simply snap their fingers and make people disappear.
- [Director] Why are we not just going
in there with drones?
- I thought you wanted to hear the answer
to the other question which was a much better question.
- [Director] Okay, so the question is,
are we losing this war?
- Yes, right now we certainly are.
And it's not just that we're losing the war,
the rate at which we are losing the war is increasing.
There is evidence coming across my desk every day
of the gravity of the situation.
It is more serious than anyone can express standing here.
It's certainly easier to say, well, it isn't that bad.
I'm looking at a small portion.
My job is to look at the big scale.
I've worked in the field in parks.
I've worked in countries.
I've worked on regions.
Now I look at bigger picture
and that bigger picture is really serious right now.
- My interest in organized crime came from years
of being a journalist, working in conflict areas
and unstable areas of the world.
And what I found was no matter where I went
whatever the so-called problem of the day was,
was predicated on crime and corruption.
The U.S. government could have more impact
if we go after the networks that facilitate all sorts
of organized crime, instead of trying
to fight specific types of organized crime.
There are far fewer people who know how to launder
and move large amounts of illicit cash
than there are poachers sneaking into parks across Africa.
If we can stop the money, make it harder for them
to move money through the global financial system
we're going to have more impact in shutting this down.
And not just the ivory problem,
but the human trafficking problem, tax evasion,
the departure of revenues from corrupt
and developing countries.
There are all sorts of treaties that already exist
that prohibit the extraction of natural resources
illegally from Africa.
We could be applying those to the wildlife trade.
And we need to think about this
as not just a ecological disaster
but a national security issues,
an international security issue.
The people who are moving ivory,
the people who are moving rhino horn,
are the same people who are moving young women
from Bangkok to Africa and Europe,
the same people who are moving drugs up
into consumer markets.
It's the people who have the capacity
to move illegal products
through the global transport system.
And it's the people who have the capacity
to launder illicit money
through the global transport system.
And so what the United States,
and pretty much every other government does,
is they stovepipe all of those different commodities
and they give different departments the responsibility
to deal with those different commodities.
So, we will have a department that handles wildlife,
we'll have a department that deals with narcotics
and a department that handles terrorism.
And the bad guys are all working together.
You know, you never see a drug trafficker
in Afghanistan who says,
"I'm not giving that Al Qaeda guy my heroine to carry.
"He doesn't have the authorities to carry my dope."
No, they're all working together.
- It's a wide range of different kinds of groups.
Some are groups that have been designated
as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.
Some are rebel militias, some are organized crime networks
and some are actually state actors,
military or police units that are taking advantage
of natural resources in the region, for their own profits.
- One of the biggest and least discussed problems
in the world today is that the illicit extraction
of resources from most developing countries
is about 10 times what they get in foreign aid.
So you're never going to get ahead of this problem
until we can stop it.
If we can stop the money
we're gonna have more impact in shutting this down.
We'll be able to have much more of an impact
against these violent networks if we go after them
for their totality of their activities for drugs,
for wildlife, for people, for guns.
I hear these going in Africa as cheap as 75 dollars.
A better quality one may be $100, $150, $200 dollars
depending on what they are.
- These are not hunting guns, right?
- No, they're the best thing ever made for shooting people.
Serious, that's what they're for.
They're for shooting people.
It's not a competition gun.
It's not really intended for hunting.
It's really probably one of the most efficient guns
ever made for shooting bad people.
That's why they are so prolific in the world.
- This rhino horn here weighs six, seven pounds.
I don't remember if this is the front or the back.
I don't know that much about them, but alls I know
is this right here on the retail market
is worth about 650,000 dollars.
That amazes me to think that, because what
that equivalates to is somewhere around 35,000 of these.
When you got $650,000 dollars in that horn right there
and you can buy a bunch of these, how much terror
do you think this whole game drives?
It's about a weapon bought to kill an elephant
and then used to rob a bank.
It's about entire local communities, poor local communities,
getting exploited by traffickers that arrive
and offer five, six years salary.
Of course, they kill an elephant for five years of salary
in Africa; they will do it here in Los Angeles.
- What we got here is about a four-foot tusk
that came off a 20 year old elephant.
This thing is worth about 400,000 dollars.
You can see how that drives the problem.
- So when we're talking about the extinction
of those species, I'm thinking of the cost in terms
of individual suffering, to highly intelligent
and highly emotional beings.
And to me this is absolutely terrible.
The sale of illegally killed ivory is being used
to actually enable terrorists groups to buy the weapons.
[dramatic music]
The terrible massacre in Nairobi was funded
by the sale of ivory.
So, the whole situation has escalated
into something that's very frightening.
It's not only impacting the elephants,
but it's also impacting the security of nations.
It's incredibly important that people wake up
and understand exactly what's going on
and exactly the price in suffering that's being caused.
[gun firing]
[dramatic music]
- The terrorist attack
on the shopping mall in Nairobi
was a big eye opener for a lot of officials
in the defense department, in the intelligence community,
in the law enforcement community,
that actually there was something to this link
between wildlife trafficking and violence.
Al Shabaab could be defeated, but I think the United States
and its partners could be smarter
about combating the message that these organizations give.
They shouldn't be engaging in extortion, kidnapping,
all of that is haram, forbidden by Islam.
Nobody takes them on according to the precepts of Islam.
These guys who call themselves Mullahs,
who call themselves Holy Warriors, are actually just crooks.
[tense music]
- You got Boko Haram, you got ISIS over there,
you got all these different people
that are running child slavery, drugs,
whatever they're doing.
I mean you got child soldiers,
they're just brainwashed to shoot anybody
that gets in their path.
The pictures I've seen is like,
I mean the elephants are, trust me, that's bad,
but when you see what they do to children it's like, uh.
- In the Democratic Republic of Congo,
5.4 million people were dead as a result
of war related causes as of 2007.
And the fighting has continued since then.
Joseph Kony has been active as the leader
of the Lord's Resistance Army for a very long time.
Hundreds of thousands of children have been abducted,
enslaved, forced to do hard labor, raped,
kept as sexual slaves.
And we know that one of their most lucrative sources
of income is trading ivory.
They trade pieces of ivory for things like, boots,
and bullets, boxes of bullets for a piece of ivory,
carried by someone who's forced to be a porter,
for hundreds of miles in some cases.
Some of the products that come out
of this organized crime networks are found
in your cell phones and your laptop computers.
But this is a personal issue
because we are buying products that contain minerals
that come from this region.
- Every one of us in the developed world
has some kind of mobile, electronic device in our pocket.
And our mobile phones and laptops need tantalum.
And one of the places on earth where you can find tantalum
is underground in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
And you have militias fighting over bits of land
that they could control the mining in and use the money
to buy guns, which has resulted in millions of people dying,
and the decline in apes, elephants, and hardwoods.
And in the illegal mines that are controlled by rebels,
they feed the workers on bushmeat.
If you're buying tantalum from the DRC,
you are helping to fund armed militias who are raping women
and using child labor to dig the stuff out of the ground.
- Animals belong in the parks.
We don't have any connection between us and animals.
Animals are for tourists; they're not for us.
Yes?
It has been like that for a very long time.
But things are changing; people have started
to understand we need to protect these animals.
The biggest problem we have
is our local people don't understand.
They have grown up with these animals in the past.
They have lived with them, they used to kill buffaloes
and rhinos and leave some to survive.
But with the exit of the colonial, when they left,
so they decided let's have these animals in the parks.
The communities around those animals felt
it is not up to us, it's not our responsibility
to take care of these animals, it's up to the government
of the day to do it.
So, even if they get killed,
even if you have poachers coming in to kill animals,
it's up to them.
So there's this disconnect.
People really don't really understand,
why there's such big fuss about killing animals.
It's not a big deal; it's not a very big deal.
Three decades ago we had 24,000 rhinos, now we have 1041.
That tells you that a child who is, my four year old son,
will not have a chance of seeing these rhino in the next 15,
20 years if something is not done.
But most of the killings that are taking place,
most of the rhinos that die, die inside the protected area.
KWS knows who is killing rhinos in this country.
They have admitted in the past that rhinos are dying
and some of their own personnel are involved.
What you can't get your head around is how poachers
can manage to get into national parks.
Last year for instance, for instance, January last year,
we had a family of 12 elephants killed on the same spot.
[somber music]
Twelve elephants, among them a very small calf.
The poachers managed to walk away with 22 ivory tusks.
You can't do it, 10 of you cannot do it.
22 ivory tusks, 10 armed poachers,
with their guns on their backs.
You have aerial surveillance; you have ground boots,
boots on the ground from KWS rangers,
and reinforcements from other agencies.
And these people get away?
Something is very wrong, something extremely wrong
in this country, yes.
[fire crackling]
- It's about tax evasion, it's about funds to terrorism
and militias, it's about money laundering.
So, the human toll is big.
So, the responsibility of China is also that.
We should start talking to the Chinese also about that.
Because behind an ivory trinket bought in China,
there is someone, not something,
someone on the ground, dead.
[dramatic music]
You have basically two fronts,
you have the African front and the Chinese front, okay?
The African front is complicated, it's complex.
You have a lot of players, all trafficking with ivory,
with rhino horn, with other wildlife products.
The second front is China.
Right now, the single most important factor
behind elephant poaching is the legal ivory market in China.
It's very simple to understand; it's not rocket science,
it's not happening on the moon, it's happening in China.
So, the legal ivory market in China is the reason
why you have a huge illegal trade
and illegal underground market in China.
It's acting like a giant vacuum cleaner,
sucking up tons and tons of ivory from all over Africa.
That's very easy to understand.
And the solution also is very easy to understand.
They have to simply phase out
the legal ivory market, that's it.
- In China, Vietnam some of these rich guys
grind this stuff up and snort it and make tea out of it.
I don't know what they do, but they seem
to think it makes their dick hard.
You know what I mean?
That's what they make Viagra for.
I mean, come on.
You need to kill a fucking rhino to get your dick hard?
You got a bigger problem than you think.
- When we look at the commercial exploitation of wildlife,
we always look at the whole chain,
from poaching to trafficking to demand.
We focus on all three major links on that trade chain.
This legal market is providing cover for illegal trade
and it also confuse the consumers
and makes them feel it's okay to buy ivory.
- [Narrator] In 2007 a CITES one-off ivory sale
created an insatiable Asian demand
which drove this global poaching epidemic.
- We found that 70% of the Chinese
do not know ivory comes from dead elephants.
In Chinese, elephant tusk is called elephant teeth.
And so when it's, teeth people thought
that you know a person's teeth can fall off
and a person doesn't have to die.
- You know, I go to China every year.
I have been for many, many years.
And I didn't realize that so many of the Chinese
believe that elephants shed their tusks
just like stags shed their antlers.
The Chinese people are beginning
to wake up to the seriousness of the situation.
It's important that people understand that the United States
has been the second largest importer
of illegal ivory after China.
- It's not enough that we're pointing fingers
at the Chinese.
We should look at ourselves, and what we've done
to Africa and what we owe the African continent
for what we've taken from them.
It's something that we as Americans
have to take responsibility for, too.
It's not just Chinese who are suddenly buying all
of the ivory.
We have a long history of doing it ourselves,
starting in the 1800s
when we imported tusks for what purpose?
We had elephants killed in order to make billiard balls,
the ivory keys for pianos, for knick-knacks.
Millions of elephants died for our purposes.
- [Narrator] Every elephant tusk represents the death
or enslavement of five Africans.
It is simply incredible that, because ivory
is required, the rich heart of Africa should be laid waste.
That populations, tribes and nations
should be utterly destroyed.
Whom after all does this bloody seizure enrich?
- When firearms came to Africa,
that's when elephant numbers started to plummet.
It was thought that then there
were probably 10 million elephants in Africa,
now there are fewer than half a million.
So, we've lost 95% of the workforce of the forest,
that recycles nutrients, disperses seeds
and creates the forests of tomorrow.
- We're running out of time.
There was room for experimentation.
There is no more margin for error.
Things are so desperate in so many places,
that either we fix the problem in the coming days,
weeks and months, and not even years, or it very likely,
in many places in Africa will be too late.
[dramatic music]
- I think a lot of non-profits
overwhelm their audience with doom and gloom.
And so I think collectively we need to find a better way
to disseminate this information.
And again get people inspired and empowered.
That's why I think you still have
to look for those gems of hope.
And that's one of the reasons why, right now I'm trying
to focus more on the survivors of these poaching.
So, what a lot of people don't recognize and realize
is that not all poached animals die.
So, we actually have a lot of survivors
on the continent of Africa.
Orphaned rhinos, orphaned elephants,
there's a whole new generation of animals
being raised that have gone through traumas.
[peaceful music]
- So, the one in front is Mashariki,
followed by Lakipi, Valdo, Moisha, Emilio, Pundani & Aruba.
Well, all these babies have become orphans
due to different reasons.
Some of them, their mothers have been killed by poachers,
due to increase in the trade on ivory,
which is a real, real problem at the moment.
'Cause normally, they're not found alone,
they should be with their families.
And some of them some of them have become orphans
from human wildlife conflict,
which means they've been separated
from their mothers by human beings.
- There is an unofficial high mortality rate
among orphans in Africa, elephant orphans.
They're using these homemade recipes
that no one has really properly researched or documented.
But I think there's more to the equation.
I think it may be sort of a combination
of medical, emotional needs, social needs.
When you have a survivor of a poaching,
whether it's an orphan who's witnessed his
or her mother killed or an attempted poaching.
Sometimes an animal will have a traumatic wound
that they survive.
What we see is that they have these emotional,
behavioral profiles similar
to post-traumatic stress disorder.
And oftentimes if we don't immediately intervene
and sort of act as their mother figure,
they give up the will to live.
So, you don't always lose orphans due to a medical issue,
oftentimes it can just be an emotional issue.
- There's been an increase in terms
of the number of orphans
that are coming to us, which means poaching is increasing,
but you know poaching is not the only reason
that is causing them to be orphans,
but it is the main reason.
Others are orphans from human-wildlife conflict,
they have been separated from the families by human beings,
due to increase in the population of man,
compared to the space or size of land.
And that causes the fights every now and then.
[speaking in Swahili]
- The poachers want the big elephants
with the tusks.
Usually those are the eldest animals, the females,
the matriarchs, the grandmothers, who know where to go
and what to do and how to behave.
So, with them gone, when they're taken out
of the population, what do you have left?
You have teenagers.
You have, just imagine if in your town,
if all the adults suddenly vanished and all you had left
were the teenagers of the high school or the junior high.
How well do you think society would operate?
- You know, saving the world is not a part time job
and it is not without risk.
We've been seeing things going in the wrong direction
in most places for many years.
And it's just not an issue that you can quantify
with wildlife surveys.
What we've been seeing is the collapse of the way of life
that has served Africa for millennia,
the relationship between people and the natural resources.
- You've got to save every one
of these animals in the rainforest.
You got to save the habitat. What we've seen
in a lot of these places that saving the habitat itself
is not enough because poaching is so strong in some places
that it just cleans out whatever species
are out there in the forest.
[elephants trumpet]
And the elephants, of course,
are a critical element in these rainforests.
Elephants are the bellwether of Africa.
As elephants go, so will everything else go.
They're so big, they're so dominant,
they're now so valuable, that the best way to get a read
on the natural state of an area, that should have elephants,
is to go in and see if they're there are not,
usually it's not now.
If they like to breathe,
it's probably a good thing to save the forest, isn't it?
But maybe they don't think about that.
They want a stable climate you have to look
at the integrity and the function,
it's called ecosystem services.
- [Jane] The elephants open up the forests
so that new life can grow,
they transport seeds in their dung.
Chimpanzees do exactly the same; they take seeds
and spread them around in the forest.
[peaceful music]
[elephants trumpeting]
[leaves rustling]
- Elephants disperse more seeds individually,
of more species of trees and other plants,
further than any other animal.
And they do that wherever they live.
So, 50 countries, 37 in Africa,
13 in Asia, have natural elephant populations.
[mysterious music]
- [Mike] Elephants in particular are unique in the sense
that their digestive process is so intense
there are seeds from certain trees
that will not germinate unless they've passed
through an elephant's gut.
So, the reason that people kill trees in Africa
is because they want the carbon that's stored
in the tree as a fuel.
They want to use it for charcoal.
[smoke hissing]
The forest is an extremely valuable asset
that the government has to try and keep its hands off.
If they don't and that forest disappears,
we will never keep climate to two degrees.
If you value the forest,
protect the gardeners of the forest.
They are not ornaments, they are not things
to go and see on holiday.
Every gorilla, every elephant, every howler monkey
in Latin America, or tapir, are working for us,
dispersing seeds for the trees of tomorrow.
And if we want those carbon stores
and those rainwater-generating forests to continue
into the next century, we have to make sure
that the seeds are being sown today to do that job.
People think there's a forest
and then you put some animals in, no.
The animals and the trees and the bacteria
are all part of that forest ecosystem.
And one of the things that gorillas
do spectacularly well is produce manure.
A gorilla will eat and produce something like,
between 10 and 20 kilos of dung every day.
That's about one hundred kilos a week.
In 10 weeks that's a ton of manure
being spread around the forest.
And in that manure are seeds.
Elephants are even more important
as gardeners of the forest.
If gorillas are the gardeners of the forest,
elephants are the mega-gardeners, because they're so big.
But we're so taken aback by how powerful
they are, we think they're indestructible.
[leaves rustling]
As human development has grown and elephant habitat
has shrunk, the elephants are constantly coming up
against people who are unfriendly, who are chasing them out
of their crops, who are trying
to defend their livelihood from the elephants.
And the elephants are seen as an enemy.
And that the latest manifestation of this,
that I've experienced is charcoal.
Because for most families in Africa
they don't have electricity, they don't have gas.
If they got to cook, they need either wood or charcoal.
In many cities, the charcoal trade
is a multi-million dollar business, which means anyone
who can pay people a pittance to go and cut down trees,
or even just branches of trees, build a charcoal kiln
and bring out a few bags of charcoal,
they'll be paid a few dollars. And that charcoal
is worth a lot of money in the city.
The first day we went out in the forest reserve,
we saw three charcoal operations.
The elephants were right next to the charcoal
and were obviously agitated.
The matriarch clearly felt
that we were posing a threat to them.
She started running towards us.
I didn't want to be hit from behind,
so I turned around and I was rumbling,
sort of a [imitates rumbling],
as we do when we approach the elephants.
She was really moving. [laughs]
I was still running backwards, still trying to placate her
when she hit me and I put my hands up to her face.
And when I turned to face her and then the camera
hit the elephant's face against my hand.
But that turned the camera off.
And it left me on my hands and knees
when I completed the backward roll, under the elephant.
And she started playing football with me.
After five seconds, one of the kicks
happened to knock the camera and turn it on again.
[camera clicking]
[elephant trumpets]
A second later, you hear
[gun firing]
which is the rangers who had fired a shot, in the air
and the elephant fled.
She came to chase the humans away,
who were hassling her family.
Now in human society, we give people like that medals.
[elephant rumbling]
- The growth in the human population and its footprint,
is a major threat, probably the single biggest threat,
to wildlife persisting into the long term.
Simply because it doesn't have to take all the land away
from wildlife, it fragments it.
We take the best bits, we leave the worst bits for wildlife.
Now, a population that used to live in a particular area
is two populations separated
by human settlements in the middle.
So, they can't literally get in contact with each other.
So one of the biggest challenges out there is the fact
that the human population, currently about seven
and a bit billion people on this planet, is going to rise
to eleven billion people by the end of this century.
And the question then is, is there room for wildlife?
- There is an actual movement in conservation to focus
on population reduction in humans as an indirect way
to improve wildlife conservation.
So, one approach has been for conservationists
to teach population control and offer reproductive education
to the women who live in the villages.
So, they've seen the childbirth, you know,
the growth has flat-lined in those villages.
- [Narrator] The desert elephants of Namibia's Kunene Region
are one of only two populations of desert elephants
in the world, the other is in Mali, North Africa,
approximately 150 individuals remain here.
- Why am I pessimistic?
Just because of the numbers of humans on earth.
And elephants are disappearing
and I can't just wave a magic wand or jump
to action and save them.
That's part of being wildlife biologists
is you see a lot of death and you get to see the rare birth
that balances out all the, all the death.
It was a life changing experience for me.
I knew I wanted to work with elephants.
We thought originally we'd go back to Zimbabwe
and work there, but then Zimbabwe
went extremely downhill, very fast.
- Yeah.
- In Zimbabwe, you know when our friends would go out
on an anti-poaching patrol, suddenly this
was a military operation in the national park,
where they would hand out the weapons
and their lives were out there on the line.
And so it takes that level of commitment, of individuals
and a commitment of society, in order to turn it around.
They're a lot of people that do value the elephants there.
And then there are a number of people, like in any society,
they won't appreciate what they have or had,
until it's gone.
- The bigger problem we're dealing with
with desert elephants is not so much ivory poaching,
it's attitudes of the people who live with elephants,
who pay the price, through destroyed crops
or, you know, untimely death of relatives
or friends from elephants or lions, whatever it is.
[somber music]
So, we need people to go to Namibia,
spend their tourist dollars, pay the local people
to tell them about their lifestyle,
make the elephants worthwhile to those people,
by sharing the wealth that we have here,
with those people there and then elephants will be valued.
In 2012, we went to Africa and we got to a village
that we know very well.
Just two days after, one of our elephants,
one of our known elephants, had been killed
by the authorities for being a problem animal.
And we didn't know which elephant it was,
but we arrived there and all that was left
of his carcass was an ear.
I looked at my ID book of all the elephants and who's who,
based on their ear patterns and I said
"Oh, this is M7, Mr. Sneaky".
The local guy who was showing us the carcass said,
"Well, the meat was given to the local people to eat,"
and he said,
"Don't you like elephant meat?"
And I said, "I would never eat an elephant,
"it would be like eating a family member."
And he thought that was the strangest thing.
We were feeling extremely discouraged
and decided we're done.
Let's just go and say goodbye to the elephants
and we're done.
The next day we came upon our favorite group of elephants,
the tuskless matriarch, and the teenage daughter,
whose name is Dorothy, was showing some breasts.
Dorothy starts to act very strangely
and all of a sudden out comes this birth sac
and poosh on the ground, a baby elephant is born.
[elephant rumbles]
[gentle, peaceful music]
[elephant rumbles]
We both said, "This is it".
"How can we give up at this point?"
- We're all in again, all in.
[laughing]
We're going for it, laying it out
on the line in order to turn the tide on extinction.
[upbeat music]
- [Narrator] Humans and wildlife
compete for natural resources.
Male elephants more often raid crops than do females
in order to gain size and reproductive advantage.
These crop raiders are then considered problem elephants.
- In case of human wildlife conflict, we always follow up.
If an elephant comes into a farm and you kill it,
you can't be charged.
It's the only income that farmer might have for that year.
He's relying on it to feed his family.
He's relying on it to educate his kids, whatever.
So, in two minutes an elephant will go in there
and destroy a whole year's worth of crops.
So, you can understand why you get out of bed
in the middle of the night and throw a spear at an elephant.
So, these are spears that we've confiscated off poachers.
Again, they poison the blade so when it goes in,
it's not only the spear that does the damage,
it's the poison that finishes it off.
The worst is when you dig one out of a dead elephant.
Sometimes it kills it quite quickly.
I say quickly, 10, 15 minutes.
Sometimes it takes days, sometimes months.
Poisoning spears is a new thing.
It never used to happen before.
It's a new technique.
But also they're using pesticides now.
They've ramped it up.
There's pesticides available on the market
and you can just go buy that from the veterinary shop,
soak your arrow or your spear in it,
and it's more lethal than the traditional poison.
[elephant screeching]
- Human-elephant conflict is a huge problem
in Laikipia County and the levels of human-elephant conflict
are probably amongst the worst in the whole of East Africa.
We got a call from one of our scouts in the field,
who gave us some information about elephants
being stuck in a dam.
You had seven bull elephants who had crop
raided the night before.
And once we closer, it became clear these elephants
weren't stuck at all, but that the community
was actually holding them hostage.
I mean you had 400 people screaming
and yelling in all directions and the elephants
didn't know which way to go.
[screaming]
[helicopter whirring]
And the arrival of this helicopter sent the population
into a frenzy because they wanted to harvest the meat,
so at least they would have something.
People would prevent them from leaving, you know,
by shouting or by throwing stones
and by driving fire towards them.
This elephant made a desperate attempt to escape.
And it charged into the shallows.
Now you had an elephant on the run amongst people.
This act of bravery, I suppose,
encouraged the other elephants
so they managed to get out as well, once the helicopter
pushed the people and cleared the way for them.
It's really tough for conservationists because people
look at us and say,
"Ah, you know we only care about the elephants.
"We don't care about the people."
This is not true,
but these are the perceptions that go around.
[splashing]
- You can't ignore that human need
in solving the conservation problems.
This generation is the generation that's now
in conflict for the first time
in many, many, many generations.
[splashing]
It's not a cultural norm for them to be
in conflict with wildlife.
They didn't conquer the wilderness the way the pioneers
did in North America perhaps,
where there were dangerous animals that were killed
to make the land safe for families.
If you can work with them to see the wildlife
and the wilderness as an asset, there is still time.
This challenge that wildlife faces now
is not about changing wildlife.
The group that has to change is the humans.
[crowd chattering]
- [Narrator] Human-elephant conflict
threatens elephant survival.
Translocating, or moving, 'problem' elephants
is one conservation strategy.
But translocation intensifies human-elephant conflict
and increases elephant deaths.
[elephant crying]:
- Another example of how we know elephants behave
when they don't have their elders around
is from young elephants that have been translocated.
So, they move in elephants that perhaps
have seen their family members culled,
all of the family members killed in another park
in South Africa, where they felt
there were too many elephants.
So, they kill all the adults, they take the youngsters
and move them out to another park.
[elephants screaming]
- My name is Barbara Wiseman,
and I'm the international president
of the Lawrence Anthony Earth organization.
Lawrence had told me there was a troublesome herd,
they hated people, because people had killed most
of the herd off.
- If I didn't take them they were all going to get put down.
So, I said, "Sure, absolutely, we'll take them".
- [Barbara] The matriarch knew how
to push over an electric fence
and short it out and escape with her herd.
They had game rangers, the game rangers all had guns,
some of them were intending to kill them.
Finally, the helicopter pilot got them back.
[helicopter whirring]
- [Lawrence] The authorities just said,
"Don't have anything to do
"with the elephant when they're in the boma,
"just leave them."
And last time we did that, they broke out.
So, I figured you know somehow they have to learn
to trust at least one human being.
[dramatic music]
- [Barbara] So, he decided to stay with them 24 hours a day,
for as long as it took, to get them used to him.
And every morning the matriarch would stand at the fence
looking like she was going to make a break for it.
If an elephant breaks through an electric fence
with their body once, they realize that they can
withstand the charge long enough,
that you can never hold them again.
And Lawrence would stand just outside of her reach
and talk to her.
- [Lawrence] Hello, my baby beautiful, hello, my bubba.
Hello, my beautiful girl.
Yes, come on, come on, come, bubba.
- [Barbara] Lawrence was staying with them,
they were incredibly hostile.
If they could have got him,
they would have pulled him in
and stomped him into the ground.
So, after three weeks of this, one day Lawrence described it
as though all of the hostility turned off,
like you would turn off a light switch, just boom.
- [Lawrence] Everything had gone calm and the matriarch
walked up to me.
And she approached me and I backed off,
and she stood there, very benignly,
ears down, great emotion around her.
Eventually I stepped forward to the fence,
and she put her trunk through and touched me.
And I thought, "Well, that's it, I'll let them out."
[peaceful music]
[elephant rumbling]
[shouting]
- [Barbara] They could be a mile away, but if they heard it
was Lawrence they would come like puppy dogs to see him.
- [Lawrence] Whenever I come back, the day I come back,
when I drive in, they'll come up to the house.
The herd emanates something, it emanates something
at a different level.
Being in proximity to a herd, apart
from watching the physical manifestations
and their body languages, you actually get an emanation.
- The elephants had been living with Lawrence
for about 12 years when he passed away.
The elephants were about 12 miles
from the house, and they perceived it.
And they walked to the house, in mourning, very sort
of sad aspect; and when they got to the house,
just very agitated they were usually very calm,
very peaceful, but they were very agitated.
And they stayed around the house for about three hours
and then they disappeared.
Interestingly, every year since then, on the anniversary
of his death, they've returned to the house.
[elephant trumpets, lion roars]
- You know, lions are not getting the attention.
It's up to us people in the field to try
and stop the poisoning.
It's all about the cattle.
People don't boma, corral their stock, properly anymore.
So lions get in.
There's a lot more cattle, there's a lot more people.
- So now we have a surge in cattle numbers
and when they start to invade the wildlife space,
that's when you get conflict.
And then of course, people, if they lose a goat,
or a cow, they retaliate.
And they go after the hyena or the leopard or the lion.
And there are only 20,000 lions in Africa.
- Well, I was a surfer at the coast and my dream of going
into the bush and playing Tarzan
and becoming a great game man, wildlife man in Africa,
was sort of lost in the waves and the lifestyle.
When I met Joy, I had written to her
and said "Have you got any openings, and she said,
"Well, I have nothing going, but I know my husband
"is looking for someone, because his previous assistant
has just been killed by one his lions."
And I thought, "Great, that sounds
"like the sort of thing I want to do."
When I joined George, his pride was down from 11 to 3.
And amongst them were two females: Lisa,
who was very affectionate, Juma, whom you couldn't handle,
because she'd been very badly treated on capture
and Christian, the lion that came from England.
[dramatic music]
Christian was coming up to two years old,
he really didn't know what he was doing.
I didn't have a clue.
Christian and I grew up together, and got into all sorts
of scrapes, had all sorts of fun,
and we taught each other everything we knew.
They're very loving and they're,
you can form a very close relationship with them,
but you got to watch it.
It's an occupational hazard.
You know, racing drivers have car crashes and you know,
painters fall off ladders, and it's no worse than that.
It makes for a better story.
- [Director] Is this one of the lions
that you guys were raising?
- No, it was part of a wild pride
that we brought up when their mother died.
Not a lion we'd ever handled.
But then eventually he got me.
All I could do was go fetal.
I could hardly...I kept sort of coming and going.
And then he got me through the neck and strangled.
George did the most wonderful things
because what he did with the respect and the understanding
that he had for these wild animals
and the way he carried it out
and just the whole toughness of it.
I mean, there he was day and night,
you know, 365 days a year out in the bush
with a pride of lions.
And they're lovely.
[flamingos honking]
So, I feel very sad, I never thought
that in the short period of time, nearly 50 years,
that I've been in Africa, I would see wild animals go down,
you know, to such low levels and be regarded
in such a low light.
[tires on pavement]
It's just horrific how things can change so fast.
You know, it's just people against wildlife
and looking after wildlife isn't difficult.
It's not rocket science, but you just got to make sure
that if there's crime, there's punishment.
And none of the big boys ever go down that are behind this,
and you don't see any middlemen caught.
Certain tribes punch way above their weight
and just ignore the laws.
The attractively dressed people that the Western world
loves so much are the worst offenders in all of this.
Lions used to be poisoned
with a very readily available cattle dip called Kopertox.
Now they're use an insecticide, which is even more virulent,
called Furadan, which comes from America.
It's meant to be banned, of course it isn't,
you can buy it anywhere.
And that's what comes with the increase in stock numbers.
- It starts with some lions going into an enclosure,
the residue carcass getting spliced with this poison.
The lions coming back, they get killed, hyenas come in,
they get killed, the vultures come in,
they get killed, it's horrific.
Lions and leopards in particular are very capable
of jumping over and climbing into these enclosures.
Leopard in particular, they go on kind of killing phase.
It's like kill everything that moves.
The owner of that livestock is not best pleased,
to put it mildly.
Many of them will kill the offending leopard
or kill the offending lion.
Almost all these predators don't like people.
Elephants don't like people.
Fully understandable, we're the big baddies.
Okay, Light for Life, it's the deployment
of a LED lighting system, a flashing lighting system
around the periphery of livestock enclosures.
[calf mooing]
These flashing lights actually represent human movement,
activity within the enclosures.
If you stop the predator
going into the boma, then there is no need
for retaliatory killing.
Then they don't need to go out with a spear.
They don't need to lay poison.
They are prepared to accept living
in proximity...as they have done for generations.
[lion grunting]
- For the last fifteen years,
I've run my own safari hunting company,
which is basically trophy hunting.
I believe in hunting.
I don't see anything wrong in shooting an animal.
I don't necessarily say you should shoot a trophy animal.
- [Director] Why are animals trophies?
- It's a memento of the experience of the hunt.
So you keep something from your experience.
Because the trophy hunting fraternity likes to say
that we're not just there to kill something,
it's about the experience.
It's not about the trophy.
It's all about being in the wilderness
and pursuing something.
In many cases underage animals will get shot, even females.
Females are not allowed to be shot.
If you do shoot a female, it's a transgression of the law.
Certain species are very susceptible to this, like lion.
Because in the field, it's incredibly easy
to change the rules.
There's no one around for miles except the game scout,
who works for me, I pay him.
You'll do a hunt of 10 days, that's 2,500 dollars you earn.
$2,500 is a reasonable amount, I believe, for 10 days.
Some people don't think so, so they rely
on a gratuity at the end of the safari.
And so, the client would be, "Well, why can't I shoot that?"
So, then the professional hunter starts thinking,
well if I let him shoot it,
maybe he'll give me a better gratuity.
You've got to weigh up your ethics and your morals
within an instant in the field.
Everyone brands the term, hunters are conservationists.
They are in that sense, but there's lots of hunters
who don't stick to that.
And look, mistakes happen.
Lots of mistakes have happened to me.
If someone tells me, as a professional hunter,
they've never made a mistake, they're lying.
I'd call them a liar to their face.
You know things do happen.
[tense music]
Taking a photograph is, you're just viewing,
you're not participating in action.
And, the act of hunting is not about killing.
It's about that participation in nature
and with each individual animal.
We as hunters tout, you know,
"Hunting is conservation.
"It's the best form of conservation."
What I've seen in my lifetime
is that our wilderness areas have just been depleted.
- [Director] So when you kill an animal,
you don't think it's murder, you don't think it's--
- I cry, I've hunted lion, every lion that one
of my clients has taken, I cry.
Because I, I feel that it's not right
to take that animal's life, he has lived a life like I have.
[dramatic music]
When you're hunting antelope, there's thousands of them.
So, it's not a big event.
The work and effort that goes into the hunting of a lion
is worthy of the respect to the animal.
For me, it's their life.
Especially a male lion,
they go through hardships, they're survivors.
Because they get kicked out of the pride
when they're two or three years old and they have
to make it on their own.
When you find a male lion that is past his prime,
when he is nine, 10 years old, he has been through
so much in that span of time, it's worthy of adoration.
It sounds stupid to now go kill him,
but you know, that's what we have to do.
That's part of the system.
The very first elephant hunt I went on was
with my stepfather and the number of elephants he killed
is insignificant to what other people have done.
We didn't boast about shooting elephants.
Before that, you know, the great white hunters,
they were shooting thousands of elephants.
They'd cut out the tusks and cut out the heart
and eat that and move on.
- [Director] Why do people want to eat the heart?
- I would not personally shoot an elephant
just for its heart.
But it, you know that's the best tasting part
of an elephant is the heart.
But to go and kill an elephant just to have that,
no, you don't do that. [laughs]
With an elephant once it's dead, it's a process.
You start butchering the elephant.
Now to cut through the skin takes,
maybe two hours to get the skin off.
When you reach the heart, it's considered a delicacy,
so you make a fire, you cut it open,
and you start cooking it on the fire.
And you put a bit of salt on it,
and you start cutting little bits off of it
as you're working, throughout the day.
I wouldn't say I despise
the trophy hunting movement entirely,
because it does serve some function
to bringing clients to Africa.
Hunting is not about collecting as many animals as you can,
getting a gold Super Bowl-style ring.
And that is what the largest hunting club
in America promotes.
They want you to shoot as many animals as you can
and then you become part of the inner circle,
and you get a ring.
You get numerous awards before that.
But that is not what hunting is about.
The American hunter thinks my 100,000 dollars
that I've paid, all of that goes
back into conservation, it doesn't.
Wow, look at that.
- Oh yeah, we have boxes and boxes.
- [Director] What are those?
- These are elephant hair bracelets.
- [Director] And where are they from?
- They're the hair that comes from an elephant's tail.
So they used to be very popular, but I guess nowadays
they're would be a social issue with wearing them.
You get about twenty bracelets from a tail.
- Just this one bag would be five or six, right?
Because there's a hundred, there's 179 bracelets in here.
- That's what we see the most common thing
on the elephant is they chop the tusks out
and take the tail, those are the two parts they take.
- [Director] How old is that elephant?
- An adolescent, maybe twelve, twelve years.
It's still a baby.
It's not right, that they end up,
an elephant ends up for this, to satisfy some,
you know, put on someone's mantelpiece.
That's not what they're, they're too majestic
and special to end up here.
[sighs]
[dramatic music]
[gun clicking]
[wings fluttering]
In terms of trophy hunting, I don't do that anymore.
- [Director] But you'll take people to Africa,
so, you're like a middleman for murder.
- Middleman for murder?
I guess you could look at it that way,
that's an extreme view, though. [laughs]
Because, what do you call it?
The, what do you call it? The abattoir,
murderous chain is already set up there.
So, rather have a good guy doing it
than a bad guy abusing it.
In Africa, it's a different situation
with the trophy hunting because the animals are utilized.
The finances, the money that comes in
from the utilization of those animals,
gets put back into conservation...theoretically.
- [Director] But it doesn't.
Who takes the money?
- The majority of the money that is made from trophy hunting
remains within the government circles.
I would say, 70% remains
within the circles of administration.
Game numbers are often fabricated,
because if you have high game numbers
it means you can harvest more, you know.
So, the utilization of the money
that comes from hunting, very little filters through
to what it's intended for.
It's intended to make the communities living
within those hunting areas benefit: education, medical,
an upliftment of their lives, for not utilizing that land.
And secondly, the conservation of the animals,
that money is meant to conserve.
- People have become much more environmentally conscious,
much more green.
And in particular when it comes to something
like African wildlife where you read the shocking statistics
and people want to do something about it.
So, when you're talking about 75,000 dollars,
for instance to hunt an elephant, or to hunt a lion,
or something like that, most of that money
is actually going to the professional hunter.
You've got the person from the United States,
often as not, who comes here to hunt an animal.
And he engages a hunting safari operator here,
a professional hunter, and the bulk of that money goes
to that individual: the 50, 60, 70,000 dollars.
And only a small portion of that actually goes
to the government in the form of the license
that they pay for the right to kill an animal.
So, 4,500 dollars and they share
that between the communities in the area
of the hunting concession. So, it's peanuts.
You're not going to get hundreds of thousands
of people coming to hunt.
You're going to get hundreds of thousands
of people coming to take photographs.
Two things actually seem obvious, to me anyway.
One is that there should be more of an emphasis
on photographic safari tourism and the second
is that they ought to raise the fee
that they charge these hunters to come in
and hunt an animal.
So, over the span of its lifetime,
a lion would generate three and half million dollars
in photographic safari tourism revenue.
An elephant is something over a million.
But the professional hunters have to come to terms
with the effects of poaching on their industry.
There just aren't that many animals left anymore.
- [Director] What was the impetus to take hunting out
of the safari business?
- I have to go back many, many years.
Really, it almost goes back to my childhood.
I grew up in Africa, we all hunted,
it was a thing we just did.
We hunted the Maasai Mara,
where the Masaai Mara game reserve is today.
The climax of the whole safari was to shoot an elephant.
I shot the elephant, the elephant charged,
and the elephant died, literally within a few feet of me.
When I saw this elephant dead,
it was like this horrendous feeling came over me.
- [Director] Did you cry?
- I said, "How could I have done this?"
No, I didn't cry, I just felt,
I just felt shocked, "How could I have done this?"
Beautiful animal, dead.
There's something about a hunt,
if you've done it, which is very, very thrilling.
You can't take the higher ground here,
oh, it's just terrible to hunt, you know?
Why do people hunt?
Why?
Because it's thrilling, it's exciting.
So, I said, "Well how can I have an exciting feeling
"about my safaris, like when I was young?"
So, I built the first camp in the world,
you see all these tented camps all over the world?
Mine was the first camp ever.
- [Director] In Kenya?
- No, in the world.
And so I hit America, in about 1966, or '67, with a slogan:
Hunt with a camera, not a gun.
[plane roaring]
[soaring, uplifting music]
I felt like a missionary.
I came all over saying "No, don't hunt!"
Have all the thrill of the hunt, but at the last minute
instead of going bang, you'd go pop,
and you'd have a lovely picture forever.
And I used to go and stay with all the people in Texas
and they had these huge trophy rooms and I would say,
"No, this over!" "No, we're going on our next hunt, Geoff,
"we're gonna do this, why don't you come with?"
And I said "No, no, no, I've got this idea."
And they go, "What the?
"That sounds so pathetic, that's a girl's thing.
"Girls do photographs, men hunt."
And I said, "No, no you have it wrong."
So, what was better?
To hunt, or to go into photography?
Everybody ridiculed it, the answer was,
"Of course, photography!"
It was the best thing ever.
- [Narrator] For every $1.00 invested
in protecting elephants in East Africa,
they get back $1.78 in tourism revenue.
- Where are all the guys who used to go hunting?
Still running around in their Toyotas,
shooting a few elephant, you know?
[chain breaking]
People who hunt always claim
they're the most knowledgeable conservationists on earth.
They say that if they weren't there,
what would happen to the land?
It would just go back to cattle.
They say, "If we weren't there policing our concession,
"the poachers would come in and eradicate all the animals."
When I was born,
there were 500,000 lions in Africa.
I don't know how many there are,
but we know 36,000 elephants are being killed every year.
We know that.
- [Narrator] Just 20,000 lions
remain on the entire African continent.
The continent of Africa is as big as China, India,
the United States and most of Europe combined.
- So, it's clearly not sustainable,
if you're gonna be shooting an animal.
So, how can anybody look at me and say,
"I'm a professional hunter
"and I'm the world's greatest conservationist."
There's something missing in their brain.
And they gotta wake up, actually,
because this is not sustainable.
[birds tweeting]
- Fifty percent of the trophies go to the United States.
So, we play a role in this also.
I guess, I'm, you know, loathe to put all the blame
on any one country, but something's got to be done.
Our role should be supporting
what African governments themselves are doing.
Because if the African people, and the African governments
don't want to preserve the wildlife,
there's really nothing that we can do from the outside.
Our job actually is to convince them that it's
in their best interest to preserve these animals
for the future.
- We cannot tell local communities,
"Oh, we feel that in America or in England,
"that it's really bad for them to hunt lions."
They'll say "Why is it bad for us to hunt lions?
"They destroy, they destroy.
"They eat our cattle, they're a nuisance to us."
But if you can convince them, "No, that lion
"is no longer a nuisance to you, it's going
"to bring these amount of people.
"Even if it kills a cow now and again, so what?
"This is what it brings in."
But it has to go to the people,
the people have to get the money.
[upbeat music]
[Baka women sing]
[tense music]
- They did a study of the use of the forest by Baka people.
The areas that were most important to the Baka people
are the areas where the ape density was greatest.
So, when traditional dwelling humans in forests
share their forests with apes, even if sometimes apes
are killed, for some special occasion, the apes do great
and the forest is healthy and the people live there.
- [Narrator] The Baka people have
over 15 words for elephant.
- If the argument is that, we need the wealth
under the land, the diamonds, minerals,
petroleum, and so forth.
If you look at the countries,
which have the most valuable of these resources in Africa,
say, where they've been exploited already
for a hundred years or more.
These are still amongst the poorest countries in the world.
So, it hasn't benefited the local people.
It is colonialism to remove people from their land,
and it's also racist, and it's also illegal.
And it's time to respect the people who have lived
in these places for, for essentially forever
and to accept the fact that they have rights,
just like we claim for ourselves.
In Cameroon there's still parks being created
and other protected zones.
Some of them are for trophy hunting.
So if you pay a lot of money you can go
and hunt a forest elephant, for example.
Although that's actually an endangered species.
There are areas, which are adjacent to the parks,
which are so-called protected, some are for logging,
some are for trophy hunting.
The Baka are evicted and pushed to the edge
and outside the park,
where their society is entirely smashed.
They turn to drink, there are no jobs.
It's not as if we're offering these people an alternative.
Tribal peoples have lived
on these lands essentially forever.
The Baka, so-called pygmies, they are stewards of the land.
They know how to look after it and how to look
after the animals, which they use,
including the ones they hunt.
[speaking in Baka language]
We're stealing their land in order to set up parks
and to satisfy conservationists and for tourism.
Lodges are built, roads are built.
There is often harassment of the animals.
And that is actually extremely dangerous
because it makes them more likely to attack people
if people are outside the vehicles.
Whereas formerly they would have just run away
and avoided people all together,
so it changes animal behavior.
There's several layers of this con trick in conservation.
One is that these lands are empty of peoples when in fact,
they've been emptied of peoples, forcibly,
often to make the conservation zones.
[speaking in Baka language]
Another is that the outside conservationists are somehow
or other better at preserving the environment,
preserving the eco-diversity,
than the people who live there.
And actually there's almost no scientific evidence
to support that and the scientific evidence
is in actually completely the other direction.
[dramatic music]
[splashing] [elephant trumpeting
- What we need to do is make sure that businesses
are doing what people want and what people want
is to have a world, which is looking after their interests,
is looking after nature's interests,
is looking after society's interests.
One of the solutions that we can bring
into this complex problem is around natural capital.
And this model that we used to have, of cutting it off,
fencing it off, making sure that it was protected.
Conserving, that word conservation is about protecting it,
and making sure no one goes there.
That isn't conservation.
Conservation is making sure we're understanding
how dependent we are on it, the benefits it gives us.
So, the idea that we should have control over it,
we should fence it off, means that we have to keep on
paying to protect it.
So, we work with the local people, we work
with the local animals, the local species.
If we can work with them,
then it ends up becoming self-sustaining.
Otherwise we end up having to pay all the time to protect.
We have to pay for rangers,
we have to pay for protections systems.
But we can only do that if we can understand the value
that it's delivering to us.
Otherwise what is the cost of doing that?
How do we fit that in our conversation?
[chimp screeching]
- The chimpanzees were really very helpful in helping me
to convince, particularly the scientific community,
but other people as well, that we humans are part
of the animal kingdom. Because chimpanzees
are our closest living relatives.
And so when you then see similarities in behavior
it's pretty easy for people to say,
"Well yes, when chimpanzees kiss and embrace
"and hold hands and pat one another,
"they're probably feeling similar emotions to us."
When you see a chimpanzee mother grieving the loss
of her child, it's pretty easy to say,
"Well, the way they feel grief must be similar to ours."
- Jane Goodall described a phenomenon
that's found in Western and Central Africa
called Empty Forest Syndrome.
And it's where the forest is standing,
but the wildlife has largely disappeared.
Why?
And the answer to that is, through the indiscriminate,
commercial-scale hunting of wildlife for bush meat.
Wire snares are set to catch, maybe they're set to catch
small antelopes, but wire snares will catch anything.
Any animal that goes in that will kill itself
in its struggle to escape.
[gorilla breathing]
- They've already got two snares here
where they set their traps on the routes of the animals
when the animals are going this way.
They are going to the water.
So they merely locate their snares
where specifically on the route of the animals
where they usually go to water.
- What the poacher will do, they have a game trail,
and they set it across trail like that.
With this end attached to a tree.
So the animal will come through,
they'll be foliage put on each side to disguise it,
it puts its head through and it's just a slipknot.
And as it goes forward it just tightens,
and as it pulls it just strangles it.
Sometimes they can take hours and hours to die.
- And why are they set?
They're set for bush meat.
The bush meat is then sold in commercial centers
and the people who do the poaching are making a killing.
A killing because they kill the animals.
But also, they didn't raise the animal,
they didn't have it inoculated, they didn't feed it
when there was a drought.
Their cost is simply the piece
of wire that they probably stole off someone else's fence
to kill this particular animal.
And the other thing is that bush meat
represents a potential risk to human populations.
It could be riddled with anthrax.
So, bush meat is a killer, whichever way you look at it.
[tense music]
- If the hunting can be controlled to some extent,
a lot of these primate populations
have a good chance of surviving.
The big problem now
is this largely uncontrolled bush meat hunting.
And it's not a subsistence issue.
It's really, it's a luxury trade, where chimp meat
or gorilla meat or monkey meat in the capital city
sells for more than beef or chicken or fish, in many cases.
So, it's really, really hard to control.
Within remaining forest areas, the poaching,
whether it's for hunting or for wildlife trade,
it's just eliminating the vast majority
of species larger than a rat.
So, you can go into the forests in the Amazon
and you can go into forests,
certainly in Central and West Africa where there's nothing.
Nice forest, but nothing.
- [Ian] This is an animated weather map of rainfall
around the world, the white is water vapor,
the orange-y bits are storms.
And every day it rains in the Congo basin,
so that big pulsing in the middle of Africa
is the daily rainfall.
We're all benefiting from the ecosystem services
provided by these forests in the tropics.
And the animals that play a keystone role
in those forests need our protection
because we want to continue
to have this global water distribution system acting
as sort of a biotic pump.
- When we started, I was basically a journalist
trying to start about extinction of apes.
It was very easy to see the consequences
of this illegal trade in body parts of chimps and gorillas
being sold to the rich and the powerful in Central Africa.
It was also very easy to see that the law
was never enforced because those that were actually
behind those trades are the same police officers
and wildlife officers that were in charge
of applying the law.
In fact, it was zero wildlife prosecutions
for all the time the law was in place.
And I went on research outside of the capital,
where people were telling me straight:
"Hey, we have chimp meat being sold here and gorilla's meat
"being sold here, and we also have two live ones."
And I said, "What is this live ones?"
And these are basically the survivors
of the bush meat trade, the survivors of the killing
of their entire family.
So, a poacher can kill different family of apes,
family of chimps, let's say.
Then he would have a baby chimp.
A baby chimp stays on the back of its mother
for the first three years of his life.
So if the mother falls from the tree dead, the baby,
dependent, doesn't run away, he just clings
to the mother's body and starts crying.
Poachers will hold in his hand.
Maybe he could kill it for the meat on it,
and sell the meat, or maybe he can sell,
or let's try my luck in the pet trade.
So, here I was in front of traffickers who were trying
to sell me a baby chimp, abused, tiny,
one and half years old baby, about to die.
I went to the wildlife station and I said,
"Listen, apply the law, there is a baby chimp here
that can be saved, this baby chimp can outlive me.
"So, please let's do something, let's get the law applied."
All they wanted was bribes.
I knew I had to do something.
Because all of this anger I had against corruption,
lack of application of the law, was right now
in the face of this baby chimp.
The following morning I took a book of law,
I went to the big house of these traffickers,
and I showed them, three years imprisonment.
And they were totally unimpressed.
And I said, "Well, you know I know this is nothing for you,
because with three dollars bribe you can get away with it."
Then I started bluffing them.
And I said, "I am part of this huge, big international NGO,
and we are here to fight corruption,
to get the law applied, that's my new job."
And at that point they just wanted
to get rid of the baby chimp.
I untied him from his ropes, and I stretched my arms out,
and he just climbed my body and gave me one big hug.
Once I gave him a hug, he was again transformed,
back to a baby, a baby with emotional needs.
And that hug became a permanent hug,
because this baby chimp basically adopted me.
[chimp laughing]
[metal clinking]
So, I called this baby chimp 'Future'.
And I realized at that point,
that I can actually fight
not just for a future of a small, one baby chimp,
but for the future of his species.
We are in the middle of a fight, a serious fight.
But I can get a good night's sleep
if I know that we got one more major trafficker behind bars,
one more official, corrupt official
that actually paid for his crimes.
- It's commercial gangs, organized commercial gangs
of meat poachers, doing it for profit,
'cause it's something for nothing.
And it's the big cattle barons.
What you have to remember about East Africa
is that it's the Wild West.
You know, you ever seen a cowboy movie?
What's it all about?
You know, move west, young man, there's gold down there.
And in the cowboy movies you see them.
With these huge herds of cattle moving. And in front
of that stock everything had to go, Native American tribes,
wild animals, forests, rivers, whatever, it was destroyed.
And that's what's happening to us.
- So we're protecting gorillas,
we're protecting elephants,
we're trying to protect orangutans.
But we're losing.
Because when we raise money for NGOs, for organizations
to support the efforts of government agencies
that are trying to protect these forests.
We're thinking in terms of tens, or hundreds of thousands,
bigger NGOs maybe low millions.
At the same time corporations are spending billions
of dollars to develop those same lands.
And the Ministers that come to our UN meetings
and sign agreements to protect apes, are often trumped
by the more powerful Ministers of Agriculture
and Land Development, who want the mines to develop
or want the roads to be put through the forest.
Even though opening the forest begins the degradation
that results in extinction.
[dramatic music]
- [Eric] With elephant tusks and with rhino horns,
it's a more complicated issue, it really is, it's a war.
A place like Kafue is kind of ground zero in that war.
And the only way that the Zambian government
is going to win that war is with help from outside
and with devoting more resources itself.
I think it's very positive that the government
understands that it has a crisis and that it needs
to take drastic measures to address it.
And certainly deploying the Zambian military
to deal with poaching would be a drastic measure.
But it could be that the situation merits that.
That it needs to take such as drastic step.
[peaceful music]
- I don't think it's a question of them not caring
about the wildlife. I think it's a question
of them not knowing what is going on with their wildlife.
I'd like to think that as proud Africans and proud Zambians,
our life is more important than money.
How can we get the community to be involved
to benefit from safari hunting?
So, that they're not tempted to poach?
[splashing] [birds squawking]
We were sitting at the camp and I was sitting
near the radio, and a game scout radioed in to say
that he heard four shots, and of course, the game scouts
were told to go and investigate what was happening.
And the game scouts went and they spent a night
in the bush and the following morning
they found the elephants.
And it was a long weekend, so I think
that was a Sunday when the shots were heard,
the four shots were heard.
And the Monday morning, the game scouts reported,
and we heard over the radio that it was reported
that they found three elephant down.
And so I jumped into my car
and I followed the game scouts to go
and see what was happening.
And I took the pictures, and I was so devastated.
- [Ranger] So this poor thing
has been suffering the whole time?
[flies buzzing]
[elephant groaning]
- I was weeping openly.
The game scouts were horrified.
I don't think there was not one person who stood there,
including the game scouts, that didn't drop a tear.
It was beyond everybody.
It was so, so sad.
Especially that she was a lactating mother.
She was a lactating mother with two small babies.
The tusks were barely that size.
They killed an elephant that takes a gestation
of 18 months and in another eighteen months
to make a tusk that size.
Even the game scouts were devastated.
[dramatic music]
- That is actual slaughter of an elephant that is put down,
still alive as the tusk is carved out of its face.
Purely so that you can have a trinket, right?
It's beautiful artwork.
This craftsmanship is exquisite,
but they used a critically endangered species to do it.
Wildlife crime is a crime that is very low risk
and very high monetary value.
It's currently estimated
at a nineteen billion dollar industry, annually.
And the fact that the sentence really is just a slap
on the wrist for people that are making millions
and millions of dollars off of everybody's wildlife.
- Well, you know, the sad thing is they will shoot them
in the knees to slow them down or to try
to stop them from charging.
You know because this, it's not likely they're gonna
get this into the brain, but they can get it into the legs
to maybe make them stumble,
fall and not be able to charge them or trample them.
Because it doesn't take much to,
you know, what does an elephant weigh, a ton?
- Eight. - Eight tons.
That thing steps on you, you're dead.
So, I would imagine that's probably with an AK
that's probably their best effort is to just try
to shoot the legs to get 'em to stop.
And then I don't, from what I've heard they
just go up and they just basically take a machete
or chainsaw and it's like, man, I don't.
How somebody could do something
like that I just don't know.
- [Azad] The animals being driven
to extinction affects everything.
This is a not an African problem.
But everyone says" "Poaching is a problem for Africa."
No, it's not.
This affects you.
- [Jane] The current rate of killing of elephants
is actually worse than in the 1980s,
because the price of ivory has soared.
You know so many elephants,
they're reckoning one elephant
every 15 minutes across Africa.
And this is completely unsustainable.
So, that some populations are already
on the road to extinction.
And if we don't stop this terrible poaching soon,
we may actually lose this most extraordinary
and amazing of land mammals.
- I think we are coming to a cultural change here.
One of those changes is collaboration.
What we now need to do is have a Renaissance
of bringing people back together.
[laughs] [speaking Sangho language]
We are part of a system here and not just some being
that can control nature.
We can't control nature.
We're part of nature.
[somber, mysterious music]